United States or Bahrain ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Well, it is no laughing matter, Mark," the Squire went on seriously. "The little comedy may not be played just as I have sketched it, but I expect that it is something of the kind. That coin has to be shown, and the word 'Masulipatam' spoken to the guardian, whoever he may be, of your uncle's treasure. But who that guardian may be or how he is to be found is a mystery.
Well, what do you make out of that?" "I can make out nothing," Mark replied. "No doubt the coin is something to be given to whoever is in charge of the treasure, and Masulipatam may be the place where it is hidden." "Yes, or it may be a password. It reminds one of the forty thieves business.
He brought back in 1661 an important collection of medals and monumental inscriptions, recognized nowadays as so important a help to the historian and the philologist. In 1664, he set out anew for the Levant, and visited Persia, Bassorah, Surat, and India, where he saw Masulipatam, Burhampur, Aurungabad, and Golconda.
His words are as follows: In the year 1657, the Anne frigate, of London, Captain Robert Knox, commander, on the 21st day of January, set sail out of the Downs, in the service of the honourable East India Company of England, bound for Fort St George, upon the coast of Coromandel, to trade for one year from port to port in India; which having performed, as he was lading his goods to return for England, being in the road of Masulipatam, on the 19th of November 1659, there happened such a mighty storm, that in it several ships were cast away, and he was forced to cut his mainmast by the board, which so disabled the ship, that he could not proceed in his voyage; whereupon Cottiar, in the island of Ceylon, being a very commodious bay, fit for her present distress, Thomas Chambers, Esq., since Sir Thomas Chambers, the agent at Fort St George, ordered that the ship should take in some cloth and India merchants belonging to Porto Novo, who might trade there while she lay to set her mast, and repair the other damages sustained by the storm.
And at the conclusion there was a clatter of metal upon wood, and then one voice, loud and rotund, struck up the first verse once more "Says Billy Norris, Masulipatam" The singer was in the middle of the stave when Desmond, rounding a privet hedge, came upon the scene.
The boats quickly returned to the ship with the intelligence that the prize was the twenty-six-gun privateer Belle Marie of Saint Malo, carrying a total crew of two hundred and thirty men, of whom eighty-seven were at the moment away in prizes, forty of them being on board the British East Indiaman Masulipatam the ship which had by this time passed out of sight in the southern board.
A large quantity of plunder was obtained at Masulipatam. Half was at once divided among the troops, according to promise, and the other half retained until the permission, applied for by Colonel Forde, was received from Madras for its division among them. The morning after the capture of the town, the Mahratta horse of Salabut Jung appeared.
Word Of The Day